Saluton! * Jim Freeze; 2003-05-28, 11:15 UTC: > How do you feel about pluralism in the other dirs? > > bin/ => bins/ > lib/ => libs/ > doc/ => docs/ > contrib => contribs/ > > or are these ok without the 's' suffix since they are > abbreviations? One argument for using singular is that this is familiar to many people: /usr/bin /usr/include /usr/lib /usr/man are typical directory names you find on a Unix or Linux system. Besides that there is the reason already pointed out. The directories are outnumbered by the files that reside in them. The above results in files like /usr/bin/grep /usr/include/stdio.h /usr/lib/libruby.so /usr/man/man1/ruby.1 The binary 'grep' that sits in the user tree. The include file 'stdio.h' that sits in the user tree. The library 'libruby.so' that sits in the user tree. The man page 'ruby.1' that sits in the user tree and belongs to section 1 of the manual. Use of plural would be more confusing. I am not sure if that has really been the reason to choose the given directory names. Another explanation would be that singulars are in most cases shorter and IIRC old Unix systems had severe restrictions on the length of file names, directory names and even on the total length of a path. Gis, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt -- e-mails that do not contain plain text, are larger than 50 KiB, are unsolicited, or contain binarys are ignored unless payment from your side or technical reasons give rise to a non-standard treatment. Schroedinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> alive.